Microsoft has agreed to acquire Powerset, a Natural Language search engine, founded by Barney Pell. Satya Nadella, Senior Vice President, Search, Portal, and Advertising said on his blog;
Powerset will join our core Search Relevance team, remaining intact in San Francisco. Powerset brings with it natural language technology that nicely complements other natural language processing technologies we have in Microsoft Research.
More importantly, Powerset brings to Live Search a set of talented engineers and computational linguists in downtown San Francisco.
Powerset said on their company blog post;
"With any start-up, the challenge is to take the seeds of an idea and grow it into a viable company," he wrote. "At Powerset, we transformed our idea into a world-class semantic search platform, demonstrating the future of search with our Wikipedia search experience. But building a large-scale semantic search engine is expensive, requiring an engineering effort and computing resources beyond what most start-ups could ever imagine...We believe that this is the fastest way to bring our technology to market at a large scale."
Barney Pell is an old friend...and a super guy. I look forward to working with Barney and the Powerset team in the future. Here is a picture of Barney and I at last year's TechCrunch Conference. Also in the picture is Jeanine LeFlore (CEO of LiveHit),and the now famous Sarah Lacy of BusinessWeek.
